The Protestant Use of the Christian Past

Spano asked whether Protestants should be concerned about the Christian past. One point of view is that they should not. He referred to the sixteenth century radical reformer Sebastian Franck, who maintained that there had been no true church or true Christianity since the time of the apostles. On the other hand, John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century maintained that “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” Both agree that Protestant Christianity must be discontinuous with the past. But the motivation of the Reformation was to recover the past, and Protestantism indeed has pre-Reformation roots, Spano said. While Protestants acknowledge only Scripture as a final authority, they maintain that doctrine and practice should be  “resourced by the Great Tradition.”